Riot gave their player base a peek under the veil of their plans to battle toxicity in their games with a Player Dynamics update.
Disruptive and negative behavior, more commonly referred to as toxicity, is a big problem for most online game communities. These behavior patterns can be anything from disrupting the game itself by not participating in the overall goal, being insulting or derogatory in communication, to outright harassment. And Riot Games, especially with their flagship game League of Legends, have an infamous reputation for having a toxic player base.
With the community complaining about these concerns vocally, Riot is already aware of the concern and already working on possible solutions. They’ve been publishing updates on their plans, and the most recent one was just published today by the Player Dynamics team.
Riot’s fight with in-game toxicity
Any time Riot puts out an update on the Player Behavior or Player Dynamics. The overall community sentiment online is that they are a nice thing to have, but they tend to not have concrete solutions that would satisfy the players. The newest blog post from Riot does not seem to break this trend either.
The post starts by talking about the concern at hand in a more general sense and tries to give players an inside look at how the reporting system works. According to the numbers Riot shared, they are getting 240M reports in a month across all of their games, which makes it easy to understand why the reporting system can sometimes feel like it is not working. And of course, there is the fact that not all reports are made in good faith, or even if they are the reported party is not actually at fault.
Riot then gives another couple of statistics, the first one being the 95/5 percentage rule, which means that 95% of people who are disruptive in games are only disruptive sometimes and only the last 5% are consistently and intentionally disruptive. And when penalized, 90% of that 95% actually correct their behavior. So how can Riot get better at punishing toxic players?
Automation against toxicity
In the past, Riot has tried to implement many changes to its games to help with detecting negative behavior. There are AFK detection systems, and chat filters, they added a pre-game lobby reporting to League at the start of the year. And according to this new blog post, automated systems will be at the forefront of their efforts in the upcoming times.
While Riot did not give too many details on their plans, the most tangible one is their attempt at Automated Voice Evaluation, which is an audio version of the current text evaluation systems they already have in place. AVE had launched in the background on July 13, but only in North America and for only testing purposes.
Aside from this, there are mentions of plans to improve combating people being AFK, actual players or bots, intentional feeding and wintrading. As much as these are big issues in most Riot Games titles, all are problems Riot talked about but haven’t brought forth a solution that satisfied the community yet.
